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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The Road to CAG-BASH: Part 6

...cruising to the end of a long first day while a black (k)night falls

Welcome back to another exciting battle report! I hope your 40k projects are going as well as mine are: I'm currently 90% of the way finished building my Tau! I spent a LOT of time this weekend magnetizing the crap out of my army. I should be able to run my 3 Crisis suits in any possible configuration with all the magnetizing and bits I bought. I even magnetized all my drones!

But, back to CAG-Bash. To recap: I'm up 2-0 in the tournament so far. My first game against Daemons went well, but I barely squeaked out a win against Tyranids in the second round. This will be my third battle for the day...and that makes for a looong day. This was also a very interesting battle for me. Remember in my Battle Report against Daemons how I was anguished about never having played them before? Well, that's also true for this next battlle, because I'm up against...

Black Templars.

Remember that part where I talked about how I had never played Chaos Daemons before, and it was a learning experience because I was making things up on the fly? And I also had never played against Space Wolves? That's also true for Black Templars.

(For posterity, as of this writing, Space Wolves are officially the only army I have never played against. For reals this time.)

I forgot to mention them at the time because, well...who the hell plays Black Templars?! I feel this is an important distinction to make. Prior to my game against Chaos Daemons, I was mildly nervous. In addition to never having played them before, they were known for being a competitive tournament army. But prior to my game against Black Templars, it was more with a feeling of...befuddlement. I remember looking at the pairings when they went up and thinking...really? Black Templars?

But, whoever it is I'm up against, this is a swiss pairing tournament, so I know he is also at 2-0 in the tournament, so he must know what he's doing. This was one of those lists that I didn't save, so I apologize in advance for not remembering his army very well. Below is the best I could do.

Black Templars with Eldar Allies

Land Raider Crusader
-Chaplain with Storm Shield, Power Fist and the HOLY HAND GRENADE
-Techmarine with Storm Shield, Power Fist, and Melta
-Bunch of regular guys. With melta.

Bastion
-Single squad inside with a Lascannon
-Pathfinders on top with an Icarus Lascannon

Single unit of Jetbikes

A Prism tank
2x Cyclone Speeders with Typhoon Missile Launchers
Dreadnaught in a Drop Pod with Multimelta and Flamer
Autarch

Yep. It's an interesting list. Remember how I gave up a bunch of Haywire shooting for some more counter-assault with the DLord and Wraiths? Dude brought not one, but two AV14 units. Awesome.

This should be interesting.

Game 3 vs. Black Templars with Eldar Allies

Hammer-and-Anvil deployment with 3 objectives worth 3 points
each.Heavy Support units worth 1 point
each and were scoring.Secondary
objectives 1 point each.

I win deployment and the roll to go
first.I take the table end with the
most LoS blocking terrain.One objective
at my end of the table, one at his, and one at dead center (this was actually a
mistake – we had both misread the mission.I technically should have been able to place the third objective
wherever I wanted since I won the roll, but as you will see the fourth mission
says to place the objective in dead middle, which is what we both misread and
what we did).Midfield is completely
open on this particular table, with zero LoS blocking terrain.The left side, from my view, has a series of
buildings and LoS blocking terrain, while the mid/right side is wide
open.

So what's my strategy here? Uhh...I didn't have anything fancy planned. I have plenty of scoring troops, now that my Heavy choices are scoring. The only things I have to take out the Land Raider and the Bastion are the DLord and the Prince, so I split them up. Prince will harass the backfield, DLord and Wraiths will harass mid. It's Hammer and Anvil, which means he's got a long way to go to get to my cultists in the back, so I'm going to focus on holding mid and taking his objective. I'll keep one Anni Barge near the rear for emergency scoring while two move forward and harass.

*Quick note on terrain. All the grey boxes are LoS blocking terrain (tall spires on this table and/or ruins with walls). The buildings were...well, buildings, blocking LoS as well. Mid was very open.

Deployment

I deploy my cultists behind the aegis behind a building in
the very back of my table.Prince and
Lord/Wraiths are on the left side behind a building.Anni Barges are front and center in the open,
lined up.

He deploys his Chaplain/Techmarine and squad inside his
Crusader Landraider in the front.Bastion is behind that with troop inside and pathfinders/Lascannon on
top.Two Cyclone Speeders are on the right
next to the Prism and a unit of jetbikes behind the bastion.Dreadnaught is in a drop pod in reserve,
along with a single Autarch.

Turn 1: Top

Prince
flies up left side of board, staying behind LoS terrain to keep out of sight of
the Lascannon on the Bastion (his run move got him just far enough for that to work).Lord/Wraiths move out to midfield.Two Barges are forced to move 12” to get a shot on the speeders, take
one out (First blood).Third Barge is
out of range of anything so flat outs in front of the other two. I'm pretty exposed in mid, but I got first blood. Good trade?

Turn 1: Bottom

Dread
drops behind barges, removes shielding from one.Landraider moves up and everything hops
out.Chaplain and squad have meltabombs
and are in front, Techmarine separates to the side.Long story short, they take out all three
anni barges.However, the one that went
flat out manages to make a ton of cover saves before dying and eats fire from
the lascannon/speeder/landraider, effectively saving some of the rest of my
army.Jet bikes move up to shoot at the
Prince, cause him to crash but he Inv. Saves the wound.Wraiths lose one
from the Pathfinders/Bastion/Prism.

I didn't think I would lose all three barges on the first turn (giving him 3 points), but I also thought his Dread would go for the cultists.

Turn 2: Top

Everything comes on.His cannon
Intercepts but fails to do anything.Heldrake flames a few off the Chaplains squad.Lord/Wraiths move up into assault range of
the Techmarine.Prince takes out bike
squad.One Scythe takes out the Dread
from behind.Lord/Wraiths roll double
ones and fail assault. Nice job Wraiths, way to be.

Scythes kill the last speeder and the Autarch.Heldrake kills all but one pathfinder on top
of the bastion with his Daemonforge superfry ability.Lord/Wraiths assault the
Landraider but fail to do anything, maybe nick the paint a little.Prince assaults the bastion, smashes, and rolls a 6 on the damage chart, causing
the whole thing to implode.One guy with
a lascannon is left in the rubble of the bastion.

Turn 3: Bottom

Landraider backs up and fires into Lord/Wraiths, failing to do
anything.Lone lascannon guy
whiffs (TS2 is a single guy).Prism shoots at Wraiths and
continues to roll very poorly.

Turn 4: Top

Lord/Wraiths assault Landraider and blow it up (AP1 Warscythes, woot).Two scythes fly off the field.One Scythe drops troops on his objective, and
they shoot the lone lascannon guy to death.Prince jumps over to the Prism and assaults it, blowing it up.

Turn 4: Bottom

Chaplain/Techmarine/Squad assaults the Lord/Wraiths.Lord kills Chaplain in a challenge, takes two
wounds in the process.Both wraiths die.

Turn 5: Top

Flyers
come back on and do nothing.Prince
joins the assault and kills everything with the Lord.

Yet
another list I have never played before.I have to admit, his rolling this game was absolutely terrible.I’m not sure moving all my Barges up into
midfield like that was the smartest move, but it did get me first blood and tempt him into jumping out
of his landraider, which allowed me to start chipping away at the squad with my
heldrake.Had I known that I could have
placed the third objective wherever I wanted, I certainly would’ve played
farther back and simply covered two objectives.The double ones roll for my Lord/Wraiths assault really sucked.Curse you GW and your random charge length
BS! All-in-all, this game was fairly straight-forward.My opponent was 2 and 0 prior to
this game, but I don’t think his list could cope with my flyers.I scored 9 for all three objectives, 3 for
all secondaries, and 2 for killing 2 heavy support choices.

This game puts me at 3-0 in the tournament overall.

Result: Victory

Final Points: 14

This is also the end of the first day of the tournament. And let me tell you, it was a loooong day. Next week is game 4, where I face off against the ultimate spoiler army!

About Me

You may know Drkmorals from such sites as MWC, FTW, STC, and now 40k Global. His personal site is Emperor's Codex. All these places he randomly spills 40k nonsense and tries to impact the community in a positive manner.